Ken Temple

So...Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa just announced it will ordain women as pastors and elders. If you are a Reformed person, you may be tempted to shrug and not care as much, but that would be foolish. Costa Mesa is the flagship of one of the largest remaining streams of American evangelicalism. When the flagship moves on male eldership and the pulpit, the rest of the stream feels it. The water is changing in real time. Unfortunately Presbyterian influence on American culture has not been dominant since the Second Great Awakening. That was nearly two hundred years ago. Methodists and Baptists overtook us in numbers and reach. American Protestantism is baptistic now. Not Reformed Baptist. Just baptistic. The broad, non-confessional kind that even Reformed Baptists find thin. That is the water most people are actually swimming in. This is why Calvary Chapel, the EFCA, the SBC, and the larger charismatic networks matter more than most Reformed people want to admit. They still hold the last significant public footholds of Protestant Christianity in the culture. When they shift, the shift becomes the new default for millions who will never read a confession. The Reformed world is a minority. It cannot set the temperature of American Christianity by talking only to itself. We must become the prophet that comes down from the mountains like a Gandolf ready for war. If the larger denominations drift on Scripture, authority, or basic orthodoxy, the drift becomes normal. Conversion gets harder. Distinctives get easier to dismiss. The fight inside those groups is not someone else’s problem. The people in them who are still holding the line need support and engagement. Their wins do not stay local. When they hold, the stream itself stays close enough to historic orthodoxy that people in it can still be reached. That is one of the few remaining ways a minority group can still affect the majority and keep a stable society.

One of the most terrifying judgments of God is not always sudden destruction or open calamity, but His sovereign act of giving sinners what they want...handing them over to the desires of their own hearts. His judicial abandonment is soul shaking! What the heart craves, God permits it to pursue and the result is a progressive darkening, shameful passions, and a mind that can no longer discern what is proper. That is where we have been and currently are. Wisdom warns in proverbs those who refuse her counsel that they “shall eat the fruit of their way, and have their fill of their own devices” (Prov. 1:31). God withdraws restraining grace, leaves a people to their idols (Hos. 4:17), or send a strong delusion so that they believe what is false (2 Thess. 2:11). The judgment is not that He forces them into sin, but that He no longer restrains the sin they love.